The Obama Administration’s Program of Collecting Citizens’ Verizon Data Is Not Something to Worry About (Although It Is Much Bigger Than You Think)

I’ve known for a while about the scope of the Obama administration’s collection of data on American telephone calls, which exploded onto the scene with the revelation this week that a court order had been issued allowing the F.B.I. to obtain millions of phone records from Verizon. And let me tell you, it’s a lot bigger than you think.

I learned details of the program—begun in the Bush administration and carried over to the present day—in the course of reporting for my book 500 Days and wrote about it. Verizon is just the tip of the iceberg. The government has been obtaining phone records from all major carriers for years—first voluntarily and ultimately by subpoena. As I wrote in the book, the phone information included the time and length of the conversation along with other metadata; however, actual conversations will not be heard.

If that makes you fear for your privacy, then hang on. The government is also obtaining e-mail records showing when they were sent, to what accounts, and the subject lines. As I wrote in the book, that information is also being combined in a massive data set that includes almost four billion public documents obtained from publicly available databases, which are then melded with other information from commercial and government sources, such as flight information from the F.A.A.

People I interviewed for the book were well aware of the concerns this would raise, which led me to write:

This data set posed its own set of risks. It would not be composed solely of records from terrorists; rather, details of the activities of millions of Americans would be included . . . the (program) was explosive. If the public learned of it, administration officials might be slammed for violating the Fourth Amendment as a result of . . . collecting so much personal data.

What was the purpose of bringing in so much information? As a moment’s thought would make clear, this wasn’t about inspecting random people’s individual activities. Instead, the National Security Agency puts the information through a larger process known as “knowledge discovery in database”—or K.D.D.—which cleans, selects, integrates, and analyzes the data. It is also run against a large set of what are known as “dirty numbers”—telephones linked to terrorists either through American signals intelligence or information provided by foreign services. Even the Libyans under Qaddafi turned over huge stacks of dirty numbers to us.

So, on its simplest level, the program—part of a broader enterprise codenamed Stellar Wind, which includes the now infamous warrantless-wiretapping initiative—allows the government to detect when someone in the United States calls a dirty number. (For those who love irony, one of the first phones found to have placed a call to a dirty number was located in the West Wing of the Bush White House; investigators determined it was a fluke, although it did raise questions about the integrity of such inquiries.)

In addition, as part of K.D.D., an algorithm was applied to the broader data set in efforts to detect patterns of behavior fitting models that had been previously established as being indicative of the activities of a terrorist cell. In regards to protecting individual privacy, the standards are strict. As I described it in the book:

The NSA would have no authority to pull up, say, some American’s email account out of curiosity. Anyone violating this ban could potentially be committing a crime, just as an unauthorized IRS employee sneaking a peek at an individual tax return could be cited for wrongdoing. But the stricture was largely theoretical; sifting through the metadata to isolate an (arbitrary) individual’s records would be an almost impossible—and pointless—undertaking.

With everything I know, and even as a die-hard believer in civil liberties, I can tell you that the program makes sense. Yes, people can rightfully be concerned about their privacy, but there are so many protections in place—including significant restrictions on how any information obtained from the data set can be used—that I don’t worry.

Think about it for a second: all of us submit muchmore personal information to the government every year in our tax returns. We disclose the cost of our medical bills, how much we spent on computers or copy paper, child support, and on and on. And unlike the data collected for this portion of the Stellar Wind program, that personal information can be studied minutely and directly by a government employee.

If this program were just for giggles, there would be plenty of reason for rage. And I won’t deny that people have the right to be upset; this is not a situation where everyone will agree. But what I do know is that the collection and analysis of this information haveled to the disruption of significant terrorist attacks. And it’s certainly hard to say that doesn’t matter.